My research interests
in
a broad sense are: (1) to understand the mechanisms of aging and
longevity,
and (2) to find ways for extension of healthy and productive human
lifespan.

Within this general
idea
in mind, and in collaboration with Dr. Natalia Gavrilova, I reanalyzed
the existing approaches to the aging problem, and came to a number of
specific
research goals described in our book (Gavrilov, Gavrilova, 1991) and
our
later publications (Gavrilov, Gavrilova, 2001a; b). These
specific
research goals are based on one general idea that deep insights into
the
nature of aging process could be obtained through innovative methods of
quantitative analysis of lifespan and survival data (available from
epidemiological,
genealogical, and demographic studies).

One particularly
interesting
scientific idea, which we would like to elaborate further and to test,
is that early developmental events are important for late-life health
outcomes,
including human longevity. We came to this idea, while developing
a new reliability theory of aging, which states that ‘normal’ organisms
are born with enormous amount of initial damage (Gavrilov, Gavrilova,
2001b).
Additional support for this idea came from our direct epidemiological
findings
that such early-life conditions as the paternal age at person’s
conception
(Gavrilov, Gavrilova, 2000), the month of person’s birth (Gavrilov,
Gavrilova,
1999), and the person’s birth order (Gavrilova et al., 2001) proved to
be important predictors of human longevity. We would like to
launch
a large-scale multidisciplinary Research Project on the role of
early-life
developmental events and conditions in human aging and longevity
(including
studies on animal models).